inflaton

In the first instants after the Big Bang, the universe expanded faster than light could cross it. Like an inflating balloon, but instead of rubber, it was space itself. On this balloon, ripples inevitably formed — tiny compressions and rarefactions from which all galaxies and stars later grew.

It all started with stretching. In the first fractions of a second, the universe ballooned — physicists call this inflation. Then the rapid expansion gave way to a phase where the field's energy converted into ordinary particles.

In the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the universe expanded at an unimaginable rate. The engine behind this expansion could have been a field that behaves like a slowly rolling ball — the axion. What makes the axion special is that, like a conductor, it can drive electromagnetic waves, creating them literally out of nothing.

The early universe resembled an overheated cauldron, seething with quantum fluctuations (random bursts of energy). In this chaos, like steam over boiling water, a special field, the scalar field, condensed. It became the 'engine' that made space expand at an incredible rate. This process is called inflation.

The neutron, one of the building blocks of the atomic nucleus, could, according to the equations, have a noticeable electric dipole moment: that is, behave like a tiny magnet. In reality, however, this effect is almost absent, creating a puzzle known as the strong CP problem.

In the first moments after the Big Bang, the universe underwent a rapid expansion — inflation. Space stretched faster than light, and quantum jitters of the vacuum turned into real particles. This is how dark matter, the invisible substance that holds galaxies together, could have been born.

The early Universe was like a tightly coiled spring. In the first moments, it expanded at an unimaginable rate — a phase called inflation. Usually, this is attributed to a special field, but there's another idea: spacetime itself twists like a spring, and this twisting (in physics, torsion) becomes the engine of expansion.

In the first moments, the Universe expanded at an enormous rate. This process is called inflation, and its driving force is the inflaton field. Its energy pushed space apart, like yeast raising dough. But physicists suspect that the dough might have left 'bubbles'—superheavy particles born from the expansion itself.

$$10^{-35}$$ seconds. A tiny instant during which the Universe manages to expand by a factor of $$10^{26}$$. Immediately after, it goes through thousands of rapid transformations — like a ball bouncing along a chain of tunnels. This cascade is the essence of chain inflation, first proposed by Alan Guth.

Clocks in the Universe are tricky things. Usually, in calculations of the birth of the world, a special scalar field plays the role of a clock — something like an invisible fluid filling all of space. It ticks, and physicists watch how the world changes relative to that ticking. But these clocks are man-made, introduced for convenience. The authors of the new work took a different path.

In the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was a stage of rapid change. A stretched rubber sheet that cools quickly becomes covered with microscopic cracks. A similar process on a cosmic scale could have given rise to cosmic strings — ultra-thin but super-dense threads of energy stretching across the entire universe. These strings are not just defects in space.

The first moments after the big bang: space expands rapidly — physicists call this period inflation. Inside this swelling fabric, like soap bubbles in a stream of air, regions of new vacuum begin to form — a first-order phase transition. Most bubbles pop or merge as soon as they appear.

In the first 10⁻³⁵ seconds after the big bang, the most rapid part unfolded. Space expanded faster than light — that's expansion of the universe (inflation). Almost the entire score was performed by a single field, the inflaton, conducting the tempo and key.

The early universe underwent rapid expansion — inflation. According to one theory, the driving force of this process (the inflaton) behaved like an axion — a particle interacting with a gauge field through a special coupling (an analog of the Chern–Simons effect).

0.965—a number that split cosmologists into 'before' and 'after'. That's the value of the spectral index ns measured by the ACT telescope as it stared into the cosmic microwave background — the cooled light of the Big Bang.

Gravity is a remarkably weak force. A small magnet holds a paperclip against the pull of an entire planet. Physicists have long sought the reason for this weakness, and one guess leads us into hidden dimensions. Perhaps gravity 'leaks' into them, losing strength in our three-dimensional world.

In the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang, the Universe underwent inflation — a monstrously rapid expansion that smoothed out all irregularities. But amid this cosmic smoothness, one "wrong" note could have been hidden: quantum fluctuations of the axion field.

In the first moments after its birth, the universe expanded faster than a match lights. This process is called inflation. It explains why today's cosmos is so homogeneous and flat. But what happened before it? Perhaps the laws of quantum gravity were at work then, and their traces can be found in the data.

A pair of black holes circles in a dance, gradually drawing closer. They lose energy and spin — a process known as angular momentum radiation. In standard Einstein theory, only gravitational waves carry away angular momentum.

2.1 × 10⁻⁹ — that's the temperature variation across the sky, about the same as measuring ripples a fraction of a millimeter high on the ocean surface. This microscopic non-uniformity is imprinted in the cosmic microwave background and tells the story of the very beginning of time.

In the first moments after the Big Bang, the Universe hummed like a bell. Inflation, the epoch of rapid expansion confirmed by measurements of the cosmic microwave background, ended, and the inflaton field began oscillating around the minimum of its potential.

10⁻¹²⁰. That's not just a small number: it's a chasm. That's the ratio of dark energy density to the Planck density, the natural scale of quantum gravity. The colossal difference of 120 orders of magnitude has long seemed an unsolvable puzzle. But the answer might lie in a drama played out at the dawn of time.

The world around us is three-dimensional, but perhaps that's just an illusion. Some theories allow for extra dimensions of space, curled up or stretched in special ways. One such model depicts a five-dimensional universe with a "diluted" dimension (called a linear dilaton).

In the first moments after the Big Bang, the universe expanded at a terrifying rate. This process is called inflation, and it smoothed out all the wrinkles, making the cosmos homogeneous. But what started inflation itself?

In the first moments after the Big Bang, the universe underwent a rapid expansion — inflation. Like a balloon inflated not uniformly but with tiny pulsations, it stretched billions of times over a fraction of a second. These pulsations froze into density ripples, from which galaxies later grew.

A new tuning fork for the cosmic symphony sounded from the Chilean highlands: the ACT telescope refined the note of primordial perturbations — the spectral index nₛ shifted upward, disrupting the harmony of many previous models.

In the first moments after the Big Bang, the Universe was not a silent void but a seething cauldron of plasma, threaded with sound waves. As the temperature dropped, the cosmos underwent phase transitions — spontaneous reorganizations that gave birth to bubbles of a new phase.

The cosmic microwave background is the petrified light of the first moments. Shortly after the Big Bang, microscopic quantum fluctuations were stretched by inflation to the scales of galactic superclusters.

A tiny star spirals around a giant rotating black hole. Slowly, it moves closer in a spiral, and this dance lasts thousands of years. All the while, waves ripple through space, like ripples on water, but these are gravitational waves. They can be "heard" with special detectors.

In the first moments, the universe expanded at an unimaginable rate — a phase called inflation. It is thought that particles of dark matter, the invisible substance that holds galaxies together, could have been born from the vacuum during this time. But what determines exactly how many are produced? The authors considered a model with two fields.

In the first instants after birth, the universe might have been multidimensional, like a sheet of paper that suddenly gained thickness. This "thickness"—the extra dimensions — began to inflate rapidly. Such superfast growth is called inflation.

The early universe underwent a rapid expansion — inflation. In a tiny fraction of a second, minuscule quantum jitters were stretched to galactic scales and became the seeds of all large-scale structure.

Inflation is the ultra-fast expansion of the universe in its first moments. It was driven by a field resembling a ball rolling down a hill. But there could have been a second, almost imperceptible ball nearby. The authors of this work considered exactly that scenario: a light spectator field (the axion), frozen at the top of its potential.

The early universe expanded at an unimaginable rate — faster than light could cross it. In this boiling cauldron, any region of space resembled an open can of paint: its boundaries continuously captured new 'vapor' from outside, while some of its own contents irrevocably escaped.

Pulsars are dead stars spinning with flawless rhythm. Their radio blips are more precise than atomic clocks. However, gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of spacetime, predicted by Einstein — disrupt that rhythm.

The oldest light in the universe has been traveling toward us for nearly 14 billion years. It was born when the cosmos first became transparent, and since then its plane of oscillation has been rotating ever so slightly. The cause is an invisible ocean permeating all of space: the dark energy field that makes the universe expand faster and faster.

Quantum noise, like the hiss of an untuned radio, filled the infant Universe. Alan Guth showed that superfast expansion (inflation) caused this ripple to freeze, giving rise to clumps of matter — the seeds of galaxies. A new method extends this picture to any theory of gravity.

The origin of the hot Big Bang is one of the greatest mysteries. The familiar picture: after inflation, the inflaton field transfers energy to ordinary particles, reheating the Universe. Yet dark matter and dark energy hint that nature has hidden sectors.

The cosmic vacuum is not emptiness but a living ocean: its energy swells and subsides, echoing the expansion. Like a lunar tide, vacuum density sensitively responds to Hubble’s tempo — the conductor’s baton of the universe.

Immediately after the Big Bang, in the seething cauldron of the cooling Universe, much like in unevenly hardening glass, stresses appeared — hairline cracks in reality, cosmic strings. Picture a tightrope walker balancing on an invisible cable stretched across the abyss of warped spacetime.